After My Alpha Replaced Me with His Rogue Mate

I have always been good at reading Ryker Palmer.

Not because I am his mate — though I am, or I was, or I will be for a few more hours yet. But because I have spent three years watching him the way you watch weather when you live somewhere that floods. You learn the signs. The way his jaw sets a half-second before he issues a command. The way his silver wolf pushes close to the surface when something threatens the pack, making the air around him feel heavier, charged. The way he goes very, very still when he has already made a decision he knows is wrong.

I see that stillness from across the great hall, and my stomach drops.

The Thanksgiving feast is everything it is supposed to be. Long tables crowded with pack members, the smell of roasted meat and pine smoke and the particular warmth of a hundred wolves gathered under one roof. Children chasing each other between the chairs. The Deltas laughing too loud at something near the far wall. Old Maren, our eldest Omega, already asleep in her chair with a half-eaten roll in her hand. I have moved through this room a hundred times as Luna, and I know every face in it. I know who needs a word of reassurance and who needs to be left alone. I know which of the younger she-wolves are watching me to learn how to carry themselves, and I try to be worth watching.

Tonight I am wearing the deep green dress Ryker said made my eyes look like the forest in October. My mark is visible at my neck — his mark, the one he pressed into my skin on the night of our bonding ceremony while his wolf rumbled with something so deep and certain it felt like the earth settling. The white jasmine scent that is mine alone threads through the warm air of the hall, and I feel, as I always feel in this room, like I belong here.

Then I look up and find Ryker across the crowd.

He is standing near the head table, a glass in his hand that he has not touched. He is watching me with an expression I have never seen on him before — something that sits between grief and resolve, which is a terrible combination on a man with his kind of power. And then he goes still. That specific, total stillness. The kind that means the decision is already made.

He tilts his head toward the corridor that leads to our private quarters.

I press my thumbnail hard against the side of my index finger. Once. Then I set down my own glass, smile at something Beta Cole is saying to the woman beside him, and follow my mate out of the hall.

The noise of the feast fades behind the closed door.

Our quarters are the same as they were this morning — the low lamp on the side table, the